The refit enteprise and photon torpedos

[biotech]

I was modelling the torpedo launchers in 3D the other day and I couldnt help but notice the hole where the torpedo comes out looks about ten feet high and twenty feet wide.

But when you actually see a torpedo in STII its the size of a coffin.

Why does it need such a large launcher?

 

[Timo]

Because the same tube also launches bulky probes?

Might be that this device indeed is more versatile than its TOS predecessor. It might even be capable of launching clusters of torpedoes the same way the similarly oversized E-D launcher is seen doing.

It could of course simply be that a torpedo launcher needs a large barrel even for a small projectile. We never did see the TOS launchers up close, and can't tell whether they were any more tight-fitting. (The ENT ones were, though, FWIW.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JuanBolio]

I'm still mystified as to how and why ENT's photons emerged from the same tubes as the conventional torpedoes.

As to the refit tubes - maybe it was for probes, maybe the warp-bubble generators need room to work, maybe it can fire in clusters.... dunno.

 

[Timo]

From what I can tell from screencaps, TPTB did use dedicated, separate photonic torpedo tubes for the first few episodes. There were additions to the CGI: a photonic tube between each pair of forward torp tubes, and a photonic tube below the aft roundel in the aft pod. These additional CGI features disappeared after that, and the photonic projectiles started flying from the standard tubes (or the aft roundel, which was never meant to be a standard tube originally).

One might say the new launchers were failures that froze up during the Delphic Expanse mission and could not be repaired, while the old ones could fire photonic torpedoes in some slightly nonoptimal manner. Or one might ignore the early addition and later disappearance of dedicated tubes, and simply say that the one launcher type could handle a wide variety of projectiles, including photonic ones.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Unicron]

The torpedo launchers magically change size when the camera's not looking so they look more intimidating.

 

[GodThingFormerly]

biotech said:
I was modelling the torpedo launchers in 3D the other day and I couldnt help but notice the hole where the torpedo comes out looks about ten feet high and twenty feet wide.

They don't look quite that large.

But when you actually see a torpedo in STII its the size of a coffin.

That is because TMP and TWOK were made by two completely different production teams.

Why does it need such a large launcher?

Have you seen the size of prototype railguns that were manufactured by various national laboratories and aerospace contractors during SDI? Obviously the photon torpedo launchers contain machinery capable of accelerating a photon torpedo to - if not FTL - then at least high relativistic muzzle velocities in order to give the intended target as little time as possible to deploy countermeasures and/or take evasive action.

TGT

 

[MarianLH]

Unfortunately for the larger probe theory, on the TWOK interior torpedo room set the launch tube hatch is barely bigger than the torpedo.

Torpedos are little black coffins when they go in, but big balls of energy when they come out. What if the extra room is for that bloom of energy?


Marian

 

[Herald]

I just can't accept that what we saw in TWOK was the actual, fully-functional, torpedo room. I hardly think that in the future starships would be reduced to lowering torpedoes on a glorified rope to be manually loaded onto a slow-moving conveyor that crewmen have to lift gratings off of.
I just tell myself that it was some sort of back-up due to battle damage knocking out the magazine and autoloader.

 

[Captain Robert April]

I prefer to think of it as a part of the Enterprise being delegated to being a training vessel, whereas an active duty ship would have an autoloading system.

 

[Timo]

I'm not sure the system we saw wasn't an autoloader system. We didn't see the crews do anything meaningful except de-mothball the mechanism (by removing the grating that had facilitated an earlier coming-aboard ceremony).

Admittedly the first torpedo to be loaded went in somewhat sluggishly, but that's actually often the case with autoloaders. After that one, the robo-arm could have been shoving torps into the launcher at a rate of thirty per minute for all we know.

Yet we also know that Trek ships don't expend torpedoes at that rate. The doctrine does not call for it; the desired effect is always attained by firing something like four torps per five seconds, then having a pause of several minutes. No need to think that the pause is due to a substandard loading mechanism. It may have a tactical reason instead: a starship might not wish to spend more than a dozen seconds on an attack run before swerving away, much as is the case with today's aircraft.

(Of course, the four-torp volley is an artifact of substandard loaders, in a way. It is what looks dramatically right to us folks who are used to the WWII type of naval combat where reloading of torpedoes during battle is impossible, or the later air combat where reloading of missiles or rockets in flight is impossible.)

Unfortunately for the larger probe theory, on the TWOK interior torpedo room set the launch tube hatch is barely bigger than the torpedo.

Since we see what looks like priming and loading machinery, not actual firing machinery, we could argue that the probes enter through a different orifice, and that the tube itself is much larger than the loading hatch we saw. (Indeed, some shots from ST6 would suggest it is.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Well, think about what goes into firing a torpedo:

1) The torpedo casings are stored in a magazine somewhere close to the launcher. They might or might not have warheads fitted during storage, but if they do have warheads fitted, they aren't "armed" (which in Trek terms means loaded with reactants)

2) The torpedo casings must then be armed. This means that they are put under external power, fueled and armed. They would probably not run under internal power until shortly before actually being launched... make sense?

3) At some point, during or after this, the torpedo casings are moved to a launching queue. They'd be kept under external power during this phase as well. Remember, they now have antimatter inside... so they should be treated with a certain degree of delicacy... don't you think?

4) The queue of armed torpedoes is stored in a "standby firing queue" waiting for deployment. (If they don't get fired, they'd eventually be defueled and disarmed after being pulled from there). Think of this like the "ready-5" status of carrier aircraft more than anything else.

5) The torpedoes in the firing queue then, just before launch, get put onto internal power, moved to a launch tube, and loaded in. They are now ready for immediate firing.

6) The launch tube would reasonably be in a total vacuum and zero gravity, with the torpedos suspended magnetically on the center axis of the launch tube. You don't want or need FRICTION, do you? So there will be a gap between the outside of the torpedo casing and the launch tube. The size of the gap is irrelevant, except in terms of the following.

7) The same magnetic field that is suspending the torpedo on the center axis of the tube then is used, as mentioned before, as a "railgun" to provide a significant initial acceleration of the torpedo beyond the ship without requiring the torpedo to use its own fuel supplies to do so.

At a safe distance from the ship's hull, the torpedo's engine cuts in and further accelerates the weapon. It can either go into a straight linear acceleration (gaining much higher velocity at the expense of maneuverability) or it can accelerate more slowly, reserving fuel for maneuverability. This would be decided by the weapons control officer prior to weapon launch. Think of it as "homing mode" versus "ballistic mode." (You might also have "mine mode?")

9) The device would track to the target, and would detonate its payload under certain preprogrammed conditions. This would include "self-destruct," "proximity charge" and "impact detonation" modes, I think. I can't come up with any other modes you'd really need... maybe a "delay after impact" mode to allow ballistic penetration before detonation, but with the yields we're talking here and the speeds we're talking here I can't see that as being necessary or practical.

Anyway... attack. Pick all that apart to whatever extent you like. But it has the following effects:

1) It explains the slow loading (the arm isn't just a crane arm, it's also the external power feed and the matter/antimatter loader).

2) It explains the disproportionality of the launch tube, and the variety of casing shapes and sizes which can be launched.

Oh, and it explains a lot of other things as well, but much of that is subject to debate (for instance, you could argue that in TOS the torpedos were launching from the dorsal, but only igniting their engines a significant distance ahead... so it LOOKED like they were coming from the p-hull from the angle we saw them!)

Attack!

 

[Timo]

Oh, I completely agree with the sequence. And the "torpedo queue" would be the reason for the railing onto which the torps are lowered: only one at a time is fed into the firing chamber from there, and the firing chamber looks like this, much like the breech of a gun. Only one projectile sits in there, slowly bobbing on a humming magnetic/gravitic field, but the railing can hold three or four additional shots.

That layout makes more sense IMHO than Shane Johnson's idea of having a "pitchfork tube" fed from a single loading bay. There would be two bays side by side, each with its own centrally mounted tube, and two arming bays above those. (This would also help explain the torp deck signage in ST2.)

The ST6 bay would essentially be the same as ST2, only with a bit of corrugated-metal covering around the central well, for added safety and security.

But the TOS layout I'd like to think of as indeed being located inside saucer. It would be a direct successor to the NX-01 system, only with more tubes (at least six forward rather than Archer's four) and a bit more finesse. But by the time of TMP, torpedo systems would evolve so that the tube and firing mechanism itself no longer was the bottleneck, hence no need for multiple tubes (but two is still better than one, just in case). And Starfleet might decide it wanted "citadel ships", with everything kaboomable clustered in the very middle of the ship where it's best protected. Real-world naval vessels have undergone a VERY close analogy of such a change, going from multiple gun emplacements along the main hull to a compact central emplacement in a special turret.

Still, I'm all for the "late ignition" theory, to give maximal leeway for deciding where exactly the tubes are on Kirk's ship, or on the "In a Mirror, Darkly" Defiant.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mister_Atoz]

good theory, I agree with it though I have no doubt it will be picked apart sometime soon.

I think I heard somewhere that the Iowa class battleships use a mostly manual loading system, that is, there is still a lot of manpower involved. This is for a ship whose whole purpose is to fire those guns.

 

[Timo]

Then again, the ships were built around those guns, back in the 1940s: to install more modern gun loader technology would mean altering the ships to a massive degree, far more than was involved in giving the ships some cruise and antiship missiles.

In contrast, the TMP/ST2 Enterprise had manpower-intensive torpedo systems at a location where her preceding incarnation had none. It can't be that she'd be hobbled by a heritage system - but it can be that the state of the art as of 2270s/2280s requires the degree of manual labor we see in ST2. (Which isn't all that much in the end.)

Timo Saloniemi